Placebo
by rannadylin
Summary: Kirkwall's templars have been taking red lyrium. Carver Hawke knows he can't avoid it forever, so he turns to Merrill for help. Set as a prequel to my other Carver/Merrill story, "The Apostate's Templar". Also with a glimpse of Fenris/F!Hawke prior to their story in "To Remain at Your Side."


I.

Three times Carver started to walk away from the door. The first time he just chided himself, "This is stupid. What's she going to do, turn you into a frog?" and turned to face the run-down building again, losing count of the minutes he then spent standing there without really seeing it.

The second time, he caught himself as he passed the vhenadahl tree, memories flashing to life of the time she had lectured him in her lilting voice on the tree's significance as he walked her home one night. Lost in the sound of her, he had heard nothing of what she said, and to this day he had no idea why the elves made such a big deal of a single tree. He sighed, tugged his gauntlets more firmly in place, and walked back to her door again, raising a hand to knock.

For a third time he was turning away, gauntleted hand falling to his side again with the door still undisturbed, when suddenly it swung open behind him and he looked back at the sound of her gasp.

"Oh! Carver, it's just you!" Merrill squeaked when she saw his face (red, he was sure, at being caught standing there like an idiot). "I thought...well, never mind. I'm glad you're here."

"You…" he coughed, if only to get his breath back. "You are?"

"Well, I'm certainly glad it's you, of all templars." She smiled; was it just his imagination that there was a cynical edge to the smile that had never been there when they'd been young, when she'd still had such hopes about her clan and that mirror, before he joined the Templar Order, before...well, he supposed recent years in Kirkwall justified a bit of cynicism. "We've been seeing that armor in the alienage more often, you know," the elf continued. "Since your sister stepped down."

"Oh. Right. Maybe I shouldn't have...I could come back later, when I'm off duty. Leave the armor in the Gallows."

"No, no, it's all right. I was just on my way to the market. Walk with me?" She glanced sidelong at him, cradling her market basket to her chest like a helpless kitten, her nose wrinkled in thought. "Unless...that is, if you _are_ here on Templar business…"

He stared back for a second before realizing what she was asking. "What? Merrill, you can't...you don't think I'm here to bring you in?"

"Well, it's what you do now, isn't it?"

He took the basket from her with a huff. "What I'm going to do _right now_ is bring you to the market. Just...pretend the armor's gone, okay?"

"Ooh, that will be tricky! I haven't seen you without it in years. I can't hardly even remember what you used to wear before. Or…" she tilted her head up at him. "Did I miss something dirty again? When you say _gone_..."

"Merrill!"

She giggled, a sound that did nothing to convince him she was not now imagining him striding through the alienage in his smalls. Imagining her imagining this brought a blush to his face that quickly progressed to a scowl, neither of which Merrill, fortunately, could see, as she walked half a step ahead of him, prattling in a way that left him confused but somehow comforted.

Hours later, laden with two more baskets than they had set out with, she welcomed him into her small home and he sank gladly to a chair she had hastened to clear of its odds and ends. "Now then," she said, perching on the edge of a table near him, "it was very good of you to come along and carry everything, Carver, but I suppose you had some other reason for turning up on my doorstep?"

His lips thinned as he looked away from her focused gaze. "Why exactly," he murmured, hefting one of the bushel of cabbages they had carried home, "did we buy so many cabbages today?"

"You came to ask me about groceries?" she pursed her lips and took the vegetable from him.

"Uh, no. But seriously, are you going to eat all of those? Do you really like cabbage that much?"

"Oh, it's not all for me. I was talking to Hera next door and she said cabbage soup is good for a fever."

He regarded her skeptically. "Who's got a fever, then?"

"Lots of people. There's been something going around, and someone's got to look after them, and -" She frowned as she realized the digression. "If you didn't come to ask about cabbages, what then, Carver?"

He sighed and leaned forward to rest his head in his hands. "I...might need a favor, Merrill."

"Oh! Of course. What can I do? If it involves cabbages, you know, we're all set." She said this last with a hopeful smile, holding the cabbage out to him until he looked up and chuckled.

"If only it were that simple."

II.

It had been going on for months. Maybe years. It had definitely started while his sister was still Viscountess. She had never exactly relished that position, anyway, but she had been determined to see Kirkwall restored after its mages and templars had managed to collaborate in bringing the city to chaos more quickly than they had ever seen fit to work together in any more peaceful pursuits. Carver had thought the Templar Order a respectable and honorable career when he threw himself into it while his sister was away enriching herself in the Deep Roads. It had given him a chance to shine, out of her well-meaning shadow, but in the end he had been glad to fight at her side and call himself her brother when it turned out that no one but Lisbet Hawke was going to do anything about the mess Meredith and Orsino had made of Kirkwall. He had hoped for better when it was over, when Meredith's madness was frozen in red lyrium in the Gallows courtyard and Ser Cullen had stepped up to fill the Templars' leadership gap. It had even worked, for a while. Cullen respected the elder Hawke even if she was a mage, and as Viscountess she had been in a position to rebuild both the Order and the Circle into something that actually worked.

But no one had anticipated more of the red lyrium. That statue Meredith had turned into? One day it was just gone, no one could say where (despite the dozens of rumors they were so eager to pass on), and in any other city that should've been the end of it. Varric's brother had only brought back the one small piece of it from his expedition, and that had been in Meredith's control - until she was in its.

Somewhere, though, someone had found more. Maybe they'd started chipping crystals off the Knight-Commander herself; maybe they'd been to the Deep Roads for it, but suddenly it was turning up everywhere in the Gallows. Carver had first seen the red vials in the Templar quarters months ago, but he wouldn't be surprised if some had been taking the stuff even while Meredith lived, if she had noted how her own use of it made her stronger, more _single-minded_ (as if she really needed any more narrowing of her focus) and had encouraged her favorites among the Order to take it too. Lucky for Carver, then, that he had fallen from the Knight-Commander's graces the more his sister rose in the city's favor. The Champion's brother might be a prize of sorts for the Templars, but Meredith was not prepared to trust him further than she could throw his wealthy, influential, unpredictable, apostate sister. And naturally, his peers who had seen him fighting at his sister's side against the Knight-Commander and her weird red sword would hesitate to introduce him to their new and improved _red_ lyrium. So it was mostly by chance that he had come to realize how widespread the trend had grown. At least half of his comrades, he guessed, had started substituting red lyrium for blue when they could get it. The red in the eyes of some of them suggested they were well on their way to sharing Meredith's fate.

He'd hesitated too long to bring it to his sister's attention, doubting that being Viscountess would mean anything if she tried to challenge templar corruption. He might have told Ser Cullen, but by then the Knight-Captain had resigned, following some Seeker off to start a revolution or inquest or Maker knew what. Soon, Hawke resigned as Viscountess too, seeing Meredith's paranoia reflected in red templar eyes again, and went haring off into the wilderness with her pet elf, hunting down slavers or whatever. And then the Knight-Lieutenant had approached Carver with one of the red vials.

"Told me he figured I could be trusted, now that Liz is gone and I stayed with the Order," Carver recounted for Merrill, rubbing at his eyes in weariness. "He gave me red lyrium and pretty much hinted that it's the future of the Templars. We're all going to switch over to the new and improved formula, become supermen or gods or something, and put an end to the mage rebellion."

"Elgar'nan, Carver! You didn't take it?"

He pulled the vial from a pouch and handed it to her. "Not yet. I...may have sort of promised I would when my next dose was due, that I'd had my regular lyrium allotment too recently to take this stuff then and there."

"Well, good." She turned the vial over, held it up to the light. "By the Dread Wolf. Why does it have to be so pretty? The way it shines you'd think it was actually good for you."

"But we know better," he agreed with a bitter laugh.

"How can they like it? After seeing what happened to their commander?"

"I suppose...those that take it, they talk about being stronger. Faster. With apostates on the loose all over Thedas, anyone would want an edge."

"Well, I haven't heard of any _mages_ taking it," Merrill huffed.

"No! I didn't mean...Look, Merrill, let's just agree this is a stupid thing for the templars to do, okay?"

"And you?"

"If I were a stupid templar, would I be here?"

"Actually," her eyes gleamed as she grinned at him, "it might be a very stupid thing for a templar to do, visiting his old friend the elven mage."

"Okay, but that's a good stupid, Merrill," he grinned back. "I'm still smart enough not to take a potion that has been known to turn people into courtyard decorations."

"That's a relief." She reached out to pass the lyrium back to him, then as his fingers closed around the vial she gripped his hand, huge between her tiny fingers with their painted nails glinting as red as the lyrium itself. "What are you going to do, Carver? Will they find out if you're not taking it?"

"If all they give me from now on is the red kind," he lowered his gaze, "you bet they will. If I don't have the normal lyrium, the stuff they've been dosing us with all these years, I'll go through withdrawal. I've seen ex-templars, Merrill. It's not pretty. It'll be obvious I'm not taking anything."

She nodded. "That's the favor, then? You're hoping I can help you get lyrium on the black market?"

"Not entirely." He met her eyes, held her gaze in desperation. "Aveline...knew some places I could look. Men who've been caught by the guard before, selling lyrium to ex-templar addicts. She didn't like encouraging the trade, but she knows it's an emergency. I came to you for...well, magic. Or something. I need it to look like I'm actually taking their red lyrium, when it's really the pure kind. Can you do that?"

"Oh!" She pulled her hand back to twist at one of the tiny braids in her hair, standing to pace in thought. "I suppose there might be something...maybe an herb I can add to the potion...perhaps spindleweed? No, maybe bloodroot. Or maybe just red berries! That'd even taste good, don't you think? I'll have to make up some test batches, of course, to be sure that we can get the red color without rendering the lyrium ineffective and sending you into withdrawal anyway."

"But it _is_ possible?"

"I think so. Yes! It'll have to be, won't it? I won't let them do this to you, Carver."

He smiled at the fire in her eyes and slowly stood. "Then I'll come by tomorrow with lyrium for your tests. In civilian clothes, even. And - Merrill?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you. I'm...really, really glad I know you right now." He flushed. "Not that I'm not glad to know you other times! I mean, you're a good - you're very - that is, we've known each other how long now? and…"

Merrill smiled and reached up to pat his shoulder fondly as she showed him out. "I'm glad we're friends, too, Carver."

III.

Merrill's first batch of "red" lyrium was more of a purple. Carver's lips twisted wryly as he held it up to the dim light of her front room.

"I suppose it's like mixing the vallaslin inks," Merrill thought aloud as she glided from shelf to shelf in the corner of the room where she kept her potion supplies. "The berries were red, but the lyrium was already blue. Together, purple."

"It's sort of a reddish purple, at least," Carver tried.

"Do you think so?" Merrill asked, the points of her ears twitching up in hope as she glanced back at him. "Reddish enough to pass?"

"Uh, probably not that much."

She sighed. "Don't worry, Carver. We'll get it yet."

After that there were lyriums of a paler lavender, and of a purple so deep it looked black until Carver held it right in front of a candle - at which point something about the heat or the light caused the mixture to start smoking, startling him so much he dropped it. As he was shouting and cursing and fumbling to sweep up the broken glass, prodding gingerly at the spilled lyrium with the edge of his tunic lest the smoking be a sign it wasn't safe to touch, he heard Merrill's laughter, bubbling like the batch of lyrium she had heating in a small bowl over her brazier just then, tinkling like the fragments of glass as he swept them into a tiny pile. He only realized he'd gone grinning like the daft, distracted fool he was when one of the glass shards bit into his thumb for his carelessness and he let out a cry as sharp as the cut itself. Merrill was at his side in a second, dabbing the blood away with a cloth and without a hint of doing anything _magical_ with it. He felt his face redden with the blood that was left in him.

"Er...thanks," he managed.

She smiled at him, thinking, and touched a thumb to his warm cheek and then back to the quick-healing cut. "No need to spill your blood for this, Carver. It's not quite the red we're going for." Then with a giggle she was back at her mixing table before he knew what to say.

She used the last of the lyrium he had brought her for her test batches in a potion that came out pink, but a deep enough pink that they agreed it might just pass if he avoided taking it in bright light. After all, he just needed enough templars to see him taking something they were already expecting to be red; so long as he could avoid direct scrutiny, it should work. He took the first dose of it that evening as the sun was setting over the training yard, the light helping to redden the vial just a little more. Ser Brand, his training partner that evening, glanced over as Carver measured out his usual dose.

"New to the red stuff, are you?" Brand asked, eyes flicking with scant curiosity over the red ( _please don't let it look pink,_ Carver thought) vial and back to polishing his own sword.

"Uh...yeah," Carver said, aiming for nonchalant, hoping the other templar couldn't smell whatever herbs Merrill had ended up mixing with this batch to make it so pink. "Guess we've all got to start somewhere, huh?"

"You'd figure this out soon enough anyway," Brand went on, "but you won't need as much now. Powerful stuff. Half your blue dose ought to do it. Don't want you going red-eyed before your time."

"Oh," Carver blinked. "Thanks. Um. Good to know."

"Don't mention it," Brand shrugged, walking away.

Carver bit his lip, considering, before finally taking the full standard dose he had just measured. After all, there was really nothing red and super-powerful about it. He could only hope that made for a safe amount of the coloring herbs, with whatever side effects Merrill might not have anticipated.

From then on, when he took his "red" doses in public, he halved them. And kept aside a portion of the blue lyrium that he was buying for Merrill to experiment with, and gave himself the blue half of the dose while he watched her mix the rest into something that looked a little more truly red each day.

IV.

Somehow, they made it work for months. Rumors of a Conclave exploding like the Kirkwall Chantry on a worldwide scale reached them soon after the sky broke out in green pox and demons, and Carver enjoyed the chance to take regular blue lyrium a little more often while the templars' attention was on world events more than usual.

Merrill started coming with him to purchase the black market lyrium as often as not. She said she wanted to be sure the quality of it was suitable for the formula she had found to make the best approximation of the red lyrium vials that now lined the walls of her little home, where Carver deposited each new bottle as soon as the Knight-Lieutenant gave it to him. Merrill still talked of how pretty they looked, all lined up in the firelight, but the sight of them made Carver shudder.

They met sometimes not in her home but in the shabby clinic in Lowtown where Anders had once worn himself thin to save so many lives. With the Warden healer gone, Merrill had been the first to venture back down to that dark hole, realizing that his death had left hundreds vulnerable to the diseases and accidents that could never entirely be avoided beneath the city. "I'm no good with healing _magic_ ," she explained to Carver when he first followed her summons to the clinic and found her setting a splint to a man's broken arm, "but someone has to do something here. And cabbages really do work wonders, sometimes!"

So he would help her with the bandages and the washbins and lifting the patients that outweighed their tiny elven nurse, because by Andraste's ashes, it wasn't _right_ for Merrill alone to bear the weight of the city. And he had added his own problems to that burden, so he'd be damned if he couldn't help her shoulder some of it. He was gone from the Gallows more and more, working with her in this fumbling dance of magic-less healing, neither of them with much training beyond Merrill's survival skills learned from her clan, and the times all Hawke's companions had occasionally had to patch one another up before Anders could get to them for the _real_ healing. It was a high-stakes guessing game in which they seemed to lose as many patients as they saved, but Merrill would still radiate such joy whenever they _did_ save one that it was all worth it. Meanwhile the templars of Kirkwall seldom remarked on Carver's absences, as they fell more and more under the sway of their red wonder drug.

Then one day his sister showed up on Anders' doorstep, a barely conscious elf slung over her shoulders. Merrill was there; Carver was not, and she sent one of Lowtown's ubiquitous urchins to summon him. He was on guard duty outside the Circle of Magi when the boy found him. His partner in the guard rotation was so far gone on red lyrium he stared unseeing when Carver cast a nervous glance over his shoulder as he hastened away to the clinic. Just as well, he thought. No one in the Gallows was probably themselves enough these days to even notice he'd gone.

The first thing he saw when he barged in the door of the clinic was Merrill, covered in blood. _Not quite the red we're going for,_ he recalled her saying once, and the shock of color brought him to a halt. "Merrill!" he choked out. "Are you...What happened?"

She smiled as brightly as ever when she met his eyes. "Carver! He's going to be all right now." Then he saw the source of the blood: his sister's elf - Fenris - unconscious on Anders' examining table, a broken arrow shaft beside him, the source of the blood. "We've just got the arrowhead out, so now Hawke can heal him," Merrill went on, and for the first time Carver noticed his sister, crouched over the elf's body, summoning healing magic with such concentration that her freckles stood out as livid splatters on her paling face. It was not a moment to intrude. He followed Merrill over to the washbasin, emptied it for her when it ran red with Fenris' blood as she washed it from her hands, and started drawing water to refill it from the little well Anders had had installed in the corner years ago. _The first thing about a clinic, is it must be clean,_ the mage had said, and for all its shabbiness, he had at least kept it clean enough to be a haven from the diseases of the sewers.

Carver finished filling the basin and turned back to the examining table. His sister, having poured all the healing into Fenris that she could for now, sat beside him on the table, legs dangling, her healing hand still resting lightly over the wound. "We shouldn't have wandered so far," she was telling Merrill.

"Oh, but you had to go where the slavers went, didn't you?" Merrill pointed out.

"We could have come back sooner," Hawke said. "We got...careless. Worn out. When that last group ambushed us, and it was just the two of us, he thought he'd stop that arrow for me with his armor, I suppose, but that didn't quite work out." Tears stood in her eyes now, her voice reaching a hectic pitch. "An inch too slow. And then we were so far from Kirkwall. I tried to get the arrow out but I was so exhausted I think I only made it worse. When he fainted, I...I wasn't sure I could get him here in time to get help."

Carver hesitated, then reached out a hand to grip her shoulder. Lisbet looked up at him in surprise. "Hey. Liz," he mumbled. "Merrill says he'll be all right now. She hasn't been wrong about that yet, all the time we've been working here."

Lisbet's eyebrows rose as she searched her brother's face. "You? Working in the clinic?" She glanced over at Merrill, who beamed a confirmation.

"He's very useful!" the elf said.

"I suppose it's no stranger than _you_ working here, Merrill," Hawke said with a wan smile. "Sometimes I do wish - if Anders were here still…"

"Like he could have even stayed in Kirkwall," Carver cut her off. "He closed that door himself. Don't blame yourself for it."

"Still," she sighed. "The whole time I was carrying Fenris home, I couldn't help thinking, _If Anders…_ "

"Enough of that," Carver frowned. "You've gotta start thinking, _If Merrill_."

"If Merrill indeed," Hawke smiled. "And if Carver, too. Thank you. Both of you."

V.

His desertion of his post hadn't gone entirely unnoticed after all. Ironically, the Knight-Lieutenant saw fit to punish him by decreasing his supply of the red lyrium. As best as Carver could tell, the new allotment, were he actually taking it, would have been enough to keep him from total withdrawal but with some nasty symptoms nonetheless. He spent a week faking nausea and lightheadness (not all that difficult, given the dizziness he sometimes felt from the herbs in Merrill's latest lyrium blend anyway). Twice in that time, he dared to sneak away to the clinic at night, through secret passages Anders had shown his sister back when his mage revolution was focused more on sneaking mages out of the Gallows and less on blowing things up.

By the time his "punishment" was over, his sister had left town again, chasing after Varric and rumors of old enemies, and leaving Fenris to recuperate in Merrill's care. The elven warrior was in a foul mood about Hawke's absence but in no condition to follow her. Carver met Merrill at her home when he could, avoiding the atmosphere in the clinic, though some days Merrill was so dejected from being constantly mistrusted and snapped at by a patient she would so have liked to befriend, if only for Hawke's sake, that Carver was all but ready to march down to Lowtown and tell Fenris off. All that stopped him was the growing dizziness that came with his altered lyrium doses.

Perhaps it was the dizziness that betrayed him in the end. He must have forgotten to lock the chest in which he'd stashed a few vials of the blue, unaltered lyrium, waiting to be delivered to Merrill's mixing table. Regardless, he was finding it difficult to focus when the Knight-Lieutenant faced him down, his pinched expression distorting oddly before Carver's tired eyes.

"Ser Carver Hawke," his superior rumbled. Carver distantly noted that he was probably meant to be intimidated by the rumble, but it just sounded too funny the way the man's voice seemed to waver when it reached Carver's ears. Somewhere in the back of his mind he realized that wasn't supposed to happen, and pondering this distracted him from what the man was saying until suddenly the Lieutenant slammed a wooden box down on the desk between them. Carver glanced at it, narrowing his eyes to bring it into focus. Oh. _Maker, no._

"Well?" his superior seemed to be expecting an answer. Not receiving one from the dazed Carver, the Lieutenant asked again, "Hoarding it, are you? You've only been issued the red lyrium for months. Care to explain how this got into your footlocker?"

Carver held his breath, which did not help the dizziness, so he gradually let it out again, wracking his dazed brain for a way out of this trap.

Cleverness had never really been his thing, not even with a clear head. But there was always _swording_. He smirked to remember Merrill calling it that, a compliment, he supposed, as much as it had confused him when she first asked him where he'd learned _swording_. _I bet you'll be the best sworder in Kirkwall someday,_ she'd proclaimed.

Time to find out.

"I guess a mage must have put it there, Messere," he told the Knight-Lieutenant. "After all, I'll need it for my magical training."

"Your _what?_ " the man sputtered.

"Oh, didn't I tell you? All that red lyrium. Seems it's awakened a hidden magical talent of mine. Runs in my family, you know. And we mages, we need a lot of lyrium." Smirking broader now, he reached for the greatsword slung across his back. "Oh, but you've got my supply now. Good thing I still know how to sword."

He swung, and ran, and never looked back.

VI.

"You _what?_ " Aveline burst out as Carver recounted the fight, stretched out on a bunk in the guard barracks with a cold compress on his aching head.

"I swear, I didn't kill him, Aveline," Carver repeated for the third time. "We fought. I had the advantage of surprise, but he had the advantage of...not being drugged up on whatever it is Merrill dyes my lyrium with. Ugh. Can't believe I said I was becoming a _mage_."

"You of all people," Aveline barked a laugh. "So what are you going to do now?"

"Besides weaning myself off of Almost Red Lyrium?"

"A good first step," she affirmed.

"I...don't know. Aveline. I really can't stay, can I? I attacked my superior officer, who is crazy enough with red lyrium at this point that he's not going to buy my plea of insanity brought on by overdoses of spindleweed-or-whatever. I can't go back, or they'll lock me up and I'll have to take the red stuff for real."

"Not on my watch," Aveline frowned. "I'm sorry, Carver. I know you hoped to do good in the Order, but there's no going back from this."

"No," he sighed, and lay silent, relishing how the world slowly ceased to spin around his head. "So that's it," he said finally. "There's...nothing for me in Kirkwall now." His voice caught on _nothing_ , caught on images of the washbasin in the clinic, of bushels of cabbages, of red lyrium vials lined up where they could look pretty and harmless, of purple lyrium amidst shards of glass and the blood on his thumb.

"Isn't there?" said Aveline, sounding suspiciously shrewd.

"I have to leave," he groaned. "My own fault. You don't have to tell me that."

"Would it help if you had a place to go?"

"Yes...No. It's not the going that gets me, Aveline. It's the leaving. There's...things I don't really want to leave, here."

"Would it help," Aveline sounded suspiciously _smug_ now, "if you had someone to go with?"

"Er...what?"

"I was talking to Merrill recently," she said all too casually. "Seems there are hordes of elves being turned out of their homes in the alienage these days. Her own home is safe enough, I've seen to that. But she spoke of...being needed. Outside the city. I think she'd be glad to travel with the refugees, see them to safety."

"Merrill?" he shouted, sitting up so quickly his head started spinning again. "Ugh. Wait, what? She never told me that."

"She wouldn't. She isn't about to leave while you need her help with your lyrium, you know. That takes priority over refugees."

He stared at her, dumbfounded.

"But since it looks like you won't be needing her lyrium blends any more," Aveline looked away, carefully studying the blandest painting on the wall, "she would be free to travel."

"But…"

"Come to think of it, I imagine a group of refugees like that could use a strong arm to defend them. Merrill always was so appreciative of your _swording_."

VII.

They left in the dead of night, two weeks later.

Carver spent those two weeks in hiding, between Merrill's house and the clinic. He crept through cellar tunnels to visit the Amell estate, quiet and weird without his sister in it, only long enough to gather some of his old, pre-Order things for the journey, knowing that the estate would likely be the first place the templars came looking for him. Orana, left to tend the big house on her own, promised to hide the trapdoor into the cellar when he slung his bag over his shoulder and followed the tunnels back into Darktown.

Even the clinic seemed empty and quiet those two weeks. Fenris had recovered sufficiently to demand his independence from his blood mage nurse, and had returned to his old rundown mansion, though Merrill still insisted on visiting there daily to be sure he continued healing properly, as Hawke had asked of her before she departed. There were fewer of Merrill's regular patients in the clinic as well. Especially her elven patients. He realized now what that meant. Like himself, they had no choice to stay in the city they'd called home. So Merrill would leave Kirkwall to take care of the people she'd gathered around her, like a clan without the markings, or the gods, or the weird traditions. Just people, who needed looking after. Like himself.

He made one more trip to the market before he met her on the night they were to depart. They might not see civilization for weeks, months; he made the rounds of the lyrium black market with which he'd become so familiar, buying up enough of the pure blue lyrium to last for a while. It had been a relief, these two weeks, taking it without Merrill's coloring herbs. Her blends had done their job; he probably owed her his life, for what it was worth at this point. But he would be glad if he never again got so dizzy from the drug as he had that day the Knight-Lieutenant confronted him.

Just one more stop, and then he made his way out of the city to their meeting point. He wasn't surprised to find that she wasn't alone. Already she'd collected a small family of elven refugees, a woman and her two small sons, widowed and orphaned when templars mistook her husband for a mage in the fighting that had washed over Kirkwall and all of Thedas when the Circles declared their independence. He'd been no mage, the woman was telling Merrill, eyeing Carver dubiously as he strode up (he must still look the templar, even without the armor); just a dockhand who'd been caught out after hours. There would be more such stories in the days and miles to come: city elves turned out of alienage homes; Dalish elves preyed upon by slavers in the chaos, only two or three of a clan escaping; servants left unemployed when their masters were killed in the rioting. Merrill would welcome them all, tell them the stories of the People, clean and bandage the wounds she had no magic to heal. Carver would be the strong arm Aveline had predicted, protecting them from bandits on the road and breaking up fights between disgruntled refugees finding it difficult to adjust to their wandering life.

He saw it all, now, in Merrill's eyes when she smiled up at him with a welcoming "Lethallin!", reaching for his hands before she noticed what he was carrying.

"Heard there might be fever on the road," he grinned, passing her the bushel of cabbages. "So I brought dinner."


End file.
